Valve is in uncharted territory as it develops a different kind of controller to go with its upcoming Steam Machine initiative. It’s understandable there would be some changes along the way, but reports from Valve’s Steam Dev Days conference indicate the beta controller has been tweaked pretty dramatically. The updated concept includes a more traditional button layout and no central touchscreen.

Valve pointed to the touchscreen in particular as one of the critical features that would allow the controller to support all the games in Steam’s catalog. The screen was going to be a clickable surface that could act as a secondary button cluster, a trackpad, or an informational display.

The image from the Steam Controller’s touchscreen was supposed to be overlayed on the game when it was actively in use so you wouldn’t end up staring at your hands, but testing showed that gamers were still looking down quite often to get their bearings. Valve has said that it wants the cost of the Steam Controller to be competitive with other devices, so perhaps that also had something to do with the change. There is some talk of an on-screen “ghosting” mode to make button mapping easier without the touchscreen, but it’s not clear how that would work.

The physical buttons on the face of the controller are in the traditional d-pad and ABXY layout. This is probably being done to ensure backward compatibility with older games. Frankly, it’s also less scary, because new and unfamiliar things are just like that.

Images posted from the conference show the buttons positioned right below the dual touchpads in two separate clusters.

This is still a preliminary design for the controller. It might change again before the device ships.